For many people the pressure to monitor apps is becoming a central part of their life, e.g. to keep track of social media, stocks, e-mail, instant messaging (IM), etc. The need to keep an eye on smart devices is increasing for many, but constantly watching a screen can be an impediment against working on other things in real life, such as managing a family, work, or social life.
One existing technology suitable to help people with this, is the ability to automatically adjust the light emitted by a luminaire when a status of an app changes. Such illumination can be made omnipresent or at least pervasive within an environment occupied by a user, and thus can be used to provide information to the user in an “ambient” form, i.e. the user can be made aware of the information through his or her general experience of the environment which he or she currently occupies, rather than having to specifically divert his or her attention to a screen or a user terminal such as a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer.
Enabling an application to control one or more luminaires can be achieved through so-called “connected lighting”. Connected lighting refers to a system of one or more luminaires which are controlled not by (or not only by) a traditional wired, electrical on-off or dimmer circuit, but rather by using a data communications protocol via a wired or more often wireless connection, e.g. a wired or wireless network. Typically, the luminaires, or even individual lamps within a luminaire, may each be equipped with a wireless receiver or transceiver for receiving lighting control commands from a lighting control device according to a wireless networking protocol such as ZigBee, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (and optionally also for sending status reports to the lighting control device using the wireless networking protocol). The lighting control device may take the form of a user terminal, e.g. a portable user terminal such as a smartphone, tablet, laptop or smart watch; or a static user terminal such as a desktop computer or wireless wall-panel. In such cases the lighting control commands may originate from an application running on the user terminal, either based on user inputs provided to the application by the user through a user interface of the user terminal (e.g. a touch screen or point-and-click interface), and/or based on an automatized function of the application. The user equipment may send the lighting control commands to the luminaires directly, or via an intermediate device such as a wireless router, access point or lighting bridge.
A summary of apps for controlling connected lighting has been disclosed for example at http://homecontrols.com in an article titled “Smart Phone Lighting Control Apps”, dated 2 Jan. 2016 (http://www.homecontrols.com/Categories/iPhoneLightingControlApps).